ADOCHS - Project progres

On 10 February, the annual meeting of the research team and the scientific committee of the ADOCHS (Auditing Digitalization Outputs in the Cultural Heritage Sector) project was held, dedicated to the improvement of the quality control process of digitized heritage collections. This event gave the opportunity to review the progress of the project in 2020 and its future evolution.

The past year was marked by the completion of the dissertations of Anne Chardonnens and Tan Lu (VUB), the fruit of active collaboration between the partners of the ADOCHS project and the two researchers. A detailed article on this event is available on the project's website: [ http://adochs.be/phd-theses/ ].        

Anne Chardonnens presented the continuation of her work on the development of new methodologies for improving the quality of metadata. The semi-centralized management of authority data based on Wikibase software is at the heart of her research, and in this regard she made a presentation on the publication of CegeSoma's personal authority data in the form of Linked Open Data through a Wikibase instance.

Tan Lu focused on improving the quality of digitized images. Through the development of mathematical algorithms, he proposed new analysis methodologies allowing the precise identification of physical damage to original documents (most often found in the form of stains, scratches or tears for example). By identifying these gaps, he improves the intelligibility of the documents, and facilitates the extraction of information during OCR processing.

Finally, Chloé Brault presented the progress of the methodological guide. As a reminder, this document, intended for digitization workshops at federal scientific institutions, aims to bring together the research carried out as part of the ADOCHS project while offering a series of organizational and practical tools to best address heritage digitization at each stage of the process.

Through the ADOCHS project, the notion of quality is thus approached from different angles by researchers with the same intention: to develop both technical and organizational tools offering cultural and scientific institutions new perspectives for the conservation, enhancement and dissemination of their collections.

A study day will conclude the ADOCHS project in September 2021. This colloquium will be an opportunity for the three researchers of the project - Anne Chardonnens, Tan Lu and Chloé Brault - to present the progress they have made, while inviting national and international researchers to discuss the question of quality in the digitization process.